Searching has been the primary mechanism for finding content within networked computing environments. Available search technologies are suited to locating free text content despite the free text not being formally organized into a data structure for browsing. Search engines typically operate by gathering content using crawlers that are configured by an administrator to function in a particular manner. Based upon administratively defined rules, the crawlers collect information about Web pages or sites, thereby allowing users to search the crawled content.
If one wishes to separate one collection of data from another, rather than lumping all data together into a single collection, the decision to do so must be made by an administrator. The search engine can be configured with appropriate administrative rules for creating two, or more, collections of data. Each collection can be processed, e.g., crawled, independently. Only after that manual decision and configuration process is complete can users direct queries to a particular collection.
Collaborative, or social, bookmarking has emerged as a way for Internet users to store, organize, share, and search bookmarks of for Web pages. In a social bookmarking system, each user may save a universal resource locator (URL) to a Web page that the individual wishes to remember or share with others. Typically, the bookmarks of one user are available to other users of the collaborative bookmarking system or are publicly available. In some cases, bookmarks may be designated as private and, therefore, be available only to the user that created the bookmark.
Some collaborative bookmarking applications promote the use of tags for organizing bookmarks. Tagging allows users to view a subset of bookmarks associated with a chosen tag from a larger collection of bookmarks. Within collaborative environments, collaborative tagging can be used to organize, categorize, and navigate the collection of bookmarks. In general, “collaborative tagging,” refers to a process by which more than one user may associate tags with various bookmarks stored within the collaborative bookmarking application.
With respect to both tagging and collaborative tagging, users associate keywords, known as “tags,” with various objects or references to objects, e.g., data. Each tag can be user-defined and is usually descriptive of some aspect of the object(s) to which the tag is associated. A tag can be viewed as a form of metadata in that each tag provides information about the data to which the tag is associated.
Unlike conventional search collections, tagged collections of bookmarks collected by end users are not organized into a logical set of sub-collections. For example, unlike typical taxonomies used for large digital libraries, the tags used to describe content in a collaborative tagging system are not defined by a rigid classification system. Rather, users freely create tags and freely associate those tags with objects or references to objects, depending upon the particular type of collaborative tagging system. This results in a “flatter” structure for classifying data. By comparison, a taxonomy is hierarchical in nature. Navigating from one item of information to another within a taxonomy requires traversal of the hierarchy.